Six stages, and no surprises in the middle.

Everything starts on Brockenhurst Road with the sample books out on the table. Bring a photograph of the room, rough window measurements, and anything the scheme has to live with — a carpet sample, a cushion, the paint chart, the colour of the sofa you are not replacing. We will ask which way the room faces, how much light you want to keep, whether the window is draughty, whether the radiator sits under the sill, and whether anyone in the house needs a genuinely dark bedroom. Expect to be there the better part of an hour.

Three decisions do most of the work. The fabric sets the look and the drape. The lining decides how the curtain behaves — standard cotton lining, thermal lining for a cold room, blackout for a bedroom, or an interlining sandwiched in between for that heavy, expensive-looking fall. The heading decides the shape of the folds: pinch pleat, pencil pleat, wave, eyelet, or a hand-finished goblet in a formal room. We will tell you where a cheaper fabric with a good interlining beats an expensive one without.

We come to you and measure properly. That means deciding the pole or track height and width first, not last, because the drop is measured from there — and a track set higher and wider than the window makes a room look taller and lets more daylight in. We check whether the floor is level (it rarely is), where the curtain should break at the bottom, how the bay is angled, whether the sill or the radiator dictates a shorter drop, and how a pair will stack back when open.

You get a written quotation covering the fabric, lining, making, the track or pole and the fitting, so it is clear what each part of it costs and what happens if you change the fabric. Once you are happy, the fabric is ordered from the mill and a making slot is booked. Lead times depend on the fabric far more than on the making — some designer cloths are on the shelf, some are woven to order — so we tell you the realistic date rather than the optimistic one.

The cloth is cut to your measurements, patterns are matched across widths and between the pair, and the curtains are made up with the heading and lining you chose. Blinds are made to the same measurements, squared and weighted so they sit flat. Where we are re-covering a chair or making a bespoke piece, the frame is stripped, checked and rebuilt before a single yard of your fabric goes near it.

We fit the track or pole, hang the curtains, and then dress them — tying each drop into its folds and leaving it for a few days so the pleats set and hang evenly from top to floor. Blinds are levelled and their cords or motors set and tested. We take the packaging and the dust sheets away with us; the room should look finished when we leave it, not like somewhere work has just happened.